A few years ago Yiannis Kypri and Andreas Vgenopoulos, senior executives at the two biggest banks in Cyprus, were on top of the financial world. Kypri courted wealthy Russian investors in Moscow while Vgenopoulos handed out millions in loans to companies in Greece, the country of his birth.

At the same time, tens of thousands of ordinary Russians also flocked to the southern Cypriot town of Limassol to take advantage of the sunny weather, the banking system and a welcoming mayor who coincidentally speaks fluent Russian. A Russian radio station and two Russian-language newspapers, as well as dozens of shops selling Russian products have sprung up. Indeed, some have taken to calling the city “Limassolgrad” because of the overwhelming Russian presence.

Unfortunately Kypri, Vgenopoulos and their staff squandered the deposits that they were entrusted with on a variety of questionable schemes ranging from a property boom in Cyprus to large bets on Greek bonds, which they bought at 70 percent of their original value. Those bonds sank to a quarter of the original value under a deal engineered by the European Union in late 2011. Laiki alone lost €2.3 billion, an amount equal to an eighth of the national gross domestic product, while the Bank of Cyprus lost €1.6 billion.

Foolish ventures aside, some say the European Union deliberately forced Cyprus to the brink in order to break up the money laundering and tax dodging schemes on the island. “If we knew at the time what might eventually happen, we might not have been so willing to join,” Afxentis Afxentiou, former governor of Cyprus’s central bank from 1982 to 2002, told the Financial Times. “It seems they wanted to punish Cyprus.”

A committee of former Cypriot Supreme Court judges is scheduled to start work this week to attempt to discover who was responsible for the financial mess – presumably investigating the work of senior executives like Kypri and Vgenopoulos. They are expected to report back in three to six months.

Mind you such questions have been asked for a while with no answers forthcoming. "How could (the Cypriot authorities) be fooled by a man who took the capital of Cypriot depositors to Greece and turned it into thin air?" Zacharias Koulias, a Cypriot independent member of parliament asked his colleagues last May. "Is it even possible for a man to come to our country, grab the capital and leave, and all these managers didn't realize what was going on?